Corona Revolution

A state of emergency that the world is currently experiencing, due to the Coronavirus, did not depend on campaigns that raised the slogan “stay at home”, but rather extended to measures to impose curfews and prevent citizens from leaving their homes, after the high number of injuries and deaths, in Many countries, from east to west the globe, to be equal due to the deadly virus, the developed and underdeveloped countries of the world, especially after the disease stormed European countries with huge potential in the field of medicine, especially Italy, Spain, and others.

Although the international emergency imposed on the world at the present time has been closely associated with an issue that seems to be largely exceptional, it represents an urgent change in the scene of global democracy, especially since many countries of the developed world have long been drawn to the large area that was given to their citizens Of freedom, especially given the Chinese experience, which has long been described by the West as authoritarian and dictatorial, and failure to keep pace with modern democracy, with regard to the great success achieved in the fight against the Coronavirus.

Here we can say that there is a great change that the concept of democracy may witness in the near future, whose features began to become clear recently, with the exacerbation of the “Corona” crisis, within the framework of the success of China, which the West classifies as an authoritarian model in confronting the deadly virus, although it broke out from its lands. On the one hand, while the developed world countries, of a democratic nature, failed to contain the matter to the extent that resulted in a humanitarian disaster, perhaps unprecedented, in Italy, at a time when great concerns arise from the repetition of the Italian scene in other countries, such as Spain and Germany, And perhaps the United States, which declared the city of New York is a “crisis area”.

Corona appears to represent a new test of the traditional democratic system, within the framework of an era in which a new international order is formed, which appears multi-polar, in which certain international powers will not be dominated by the levers of international affairs, at the expense of other powers, which appears in the great rise of both Russia and China and their unparalleled success in crowding out American influence in many regions of the world.

The Corona crisis represents a clear extension of what we can call a state of “revolution” over democracy, a situation that the people of the developed world, in Europe and the United States, started in recent years in protest of the results of the electoral funds, which is considered a “coup” On the rules that these states have long established, while they appeared clearly in the direction of the extreme right currents after that, to reach their range in the case of “nostalgia” to dictatorial times by launching movements and marches to lament the historic leaders of Nazism and fascism, especially in the countries of the old continent, along the lines of Hitler and Mussolini.

The Corona virus has greatly affected health services capabilities around the world and posed great challenges to the world economy as financial markets collapsed and companies got rid of their workers. But experts have warned that the epidemic will reshape politics by increasing the hardening of dictatorial regimes in exchange for a decline in democracy in some countries, especially in fragile states where tyrants try to strengthen their rule.

Emergency declarations based on the Covid-19 epidemic should not be used to target specific groups, minorities or individuals and should not be a cover for repression under the guise of protecting health, nor should they be used to silence human rights defenders. There are many signs of governments using and using the epidemic to advance their interests.

The International human rights law guarantees everyone the right to the highest attainable standard of health and obligates governments to take steps to prevent threats to public health and to provide medical care to those who need it. Human rights law also recognizes that in the context of serious public health threats and public emergencies threatening the life of the nation, restrictions on some rights can be justified when they have a legal basis, are strictly necessary, based on scientific evidence and neither arbitrary nor discriminatory in application, of limited duration, respectful of human dignity, subject to review, and proportionate to achieve the objective.

The scale and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic clearly rises to the level of a public health threat that could justify restrictions on certain rights, such as those that result from the imposition of quarantine or isolation limiting freedom of movement. At the same time, careful attention to human rights such as non-discrimination and human rights principles such as transparency and respect for human dignity can foster an effective response amidst the turmoil and disruption that inevitably results in times of crisis and limit the harms that can come from the imposition of overly broad measures that do not meet the above criteria.

Under international human rights law, governments have an obligation to protect the right to freedom of expression, including the right to seek, receive, and impart information of all kinds, regardless of frontiers. Permissible restrictions on freedom of expression for reasons of public health, noted above, may not put in jeopardy the right itself.

Governments are responsible for providing information necessary for the protection and promotion of rights, including the right to health. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights regards as a “core obligation” providing “education and access to information concerning the main health problems in the community, including methods of preventing and controlling them.” A rights-respecting response to COVID-19 needs to ensure that accurate and up-to-date information about the virus, access to services, service disruptions, and other aspects of the response to the outbreak is readily available and accessible to all.

Democracy in its traditional concept faces various crises, or perhaps successive tests, within the framework of a changing world order, and therefore its survival seems linked to the survival of the traditional system, established by Washington and its allies in the European West in the aftermath of the Cold War, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the United States monopolizing The summit of the international system, which has become difficult to continue in light of many political and economic changes and new international data, after new forces succeeded in emerging to compete with the American forces.